Murray Dewart and Robert Pinsky

Harvard Book Store welcomes sculptor MURRAY DEWART and former poet laureate ROBERT PINSKY for a discussion of their book Poems About Sculpture. Edited by Mr. Dewart and with a foreward by Mr. Pinsky, Poems About Sculpture is a unique anthology of poems from around the world and across the ages about our most enduring art form. Mr. Pinsky will also discuss his latest poetry collection, At the Foundling Hospital.

About Poems About Sculpture

Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era, we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied by the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats’s Grecian urn and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to contemporary verse about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Janet Echelman’s wind-borne hovering nets, the pieces in this collection convert the physical materials of the plastic arts—clay, wood, glass, marble, granite, bronze, and more—into lapidary lines of poetry. Whether the sculptures celebrated here commemorate love or war, objects or apparitions, forms human or divine, they have called forth evocative responses from a wide range of poets, including Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, and Plath. A compendium of dazzling examples of one art form reflecting on another, Poems About Sculpture is a treat for art lovers of all kinds.

About At the Foundling Hospital

"Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky." —James Longenbach, The Nation

The poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it is invisible. An extreme example is the abandoned newborn. At the Foundling Hospital of eighteenth-century London, in a benign and oddly bureaucratic process, each new infant was identified by a duly recorded token. A minimal, charged particle of meaning, the token might be a coin or brooch or thimble—or sometimes a poem, such as the one quoted in full in Pinsky's poem "The Foundling Tokens." A foundling may inherit less of a past than an orphan, but with a wider set of meanings. The foundling soul needs to be adopted, and it needs to be adaptive. In one poem, French and German appear as originally Creole tongues, invented by the rough needs of conquered peoples and their Roman masters. In another, creators from scorned or excluded groups—among them Irving Berlin, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and W.E.B. Du Bois—speak, as does the Greek tragic chorus, in the first-person singular. In these poems, a sometimes desperate, perpetual reimagining of identity, on the scale of one life or of human history, is deeply related to music: The quest is lyrical, whether the subject is as specific as "the emanation of a dead star still alive" or as personal as the "pinhole iris of your mortal eye."